Don't Let the New Baby Cry

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Takoma Park Station, Washington, D. C. · Oct 26, 1916

Don't Let the New Baby Cry

It is hard to realize that the tiny baby, lying all day long in its crib, and hardly able to lift its head from the pillow, is really doing more “work” than the mother who cares for it, or the father who toils long hours over his desk. Yet this is the fact. The baby's heart beats nearly twice as fast as an adult's; its lungs pump to correspond. Both, when the infant lies asleep, are working as rapidly as those of a grown person quite out of breath with running. All the little one's bodily processes go on at the same high speed.

The result is that while an ordinary adult, toiling at some sedentary vocation, does sixteen or seventeen calories of work each day for each pound of his weight, all normal infants do thirty. Some go as high as forty-five. They work, then, two or three times as hard as most of their elders.

One of the latest studies at the nutrition laboratory which the Carnegie Institute maintains in Boston, has shown that no small part of the baby's work is done in crying. An unhappy baby, wailing and tossing restlessly, may add as much as a fifth to the work which a contented child would do.

All this is sheer waste. Whatever energy the child expends in crying is just so much lost for growth. The food that he uses up in discomfort will never be used for anything else.

This matter is especially important during the first few days of life. Rarely during this period does any baby get enough food to keep him going. He has, therefore, to live in part on his own tissues, like a starving man. This is bad enough at best, but how much worse to let the newborn babe exhaust his little body still more by the hard labor of crying! By and by he may have to be let cry for the good of his soul; but for the beginning, “anything for comfort,” lest the slender forces that should be getting the first grip on life be spent in useless pain.—American Motherhood.